There are some people who are always going to complain about handouts, yes. But people who are unemployed, or have recently been unemployed, or have close friends or family who have been, are going to be a lot more receptive to the idea that if you can't get a job, it's not your fault.

Once again, I think it comes back to tribalism. People are a lot more likely to want to help if it's something that affects their own circle.

Put another way: fairness is a matter of framing. There are a whole lot of people who think it's unfair that Donald Trump and Paris Hilton get to be rich and avoid paying taxes when there are people out there who lost their Walmart greeter jobs and can't afford rent.

It's not even all people cutting it the other way, either. A lot of people (I guess the percentage depends on how cynical you are) DO value compassion over making people stay homeless because "they're obviously too lazy to get a job" or whatever.

Estimates vary for how quickly automation will disrupt the US job market. The report cites two different attempts to predict the rate of automation. Optimistically, researchers at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development found that many occupations are likely to change as some of their associated tasks become automated but not go away entirely. They estimate that only 9 percent of jobs are at risk in the next decade or two. However a separate analysis by Carl Frey and Michael Osbourne, which asked a panel of experts on AI to classify occupations by how likely automation would be to replace them, found that 47 percent of US jobs are at risk.

That's a pretty broad range, but even the 9% estimate is a fuck of a lot.

If those numbers are even close to accurate, and if we don't see new kinds of jobs cropping up in significant enough numbers to offset them, then we're looking at unemployment numbers that are going to make '08 look like a fucking tropical vacation. At which point I think UBI is going to become a much more popular and mainstream proposition.

It's not a coincidence that the biggest expansion of social programs in our history was during the Great Depression.

Estimates vary for how quickly automation will disrupt the US job market. The report cites two different attempts to predict the rate of automation. Optimistically, researchers at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development found that many occupations are likely to change as some of their associated tasks become automated but not go away entirely. They estimate that only 9 percent of jobs are at risk in the next decade or two. However a separate analysis by Carl Frey and Michael Osbourne, which asked a panel of experts on AI to classify occupations by how likely automation would be to replace them, found that 47 percent of US jobs are at risk.

That's a pretty broad range, but even the 9% estimate is a fuck of a lot.

If those numbers are even close to accurate, and if we don't see new kinds of jobs cropping up in significant enough numbers to offset them, then we're looking at unemployment numbers that are going to make '08 look like a fucking tropical vacation. At which point I think UBI is going to become a much more popular and mainstream proposition.

It's not a coincidence that the biggest expansion of social programs in our history was during the Great Depression.

Wewwwwww yeah even 9% is pretty huge.

I know a couple guys. Real smart guys, quite successful. They're always on people because the jobs and employment numbers and such contradict the idea that people are being obsoleted. For instance, the US unemployment fell below 5% and that's corrected for a number of factors - they go pretty deep on the data, looking at things like people in the workforce and how the numbers are generated and weighted to verify them (like factoring in the meaning of the numbers of people who are considered to not be looking for work at all, etc.), full-time work vs. part-time work, and so on.

However, I think there's a couple things that they're still overlooking. First, a huge proportion of new jobs are "temp" work, even if they're nominally full-time. Or contracts, freelance, etc. True proper full-time employment is on fucking life support.

In some ways, you can argue that companies have moved to this as a cost-reduction measure because they can get away with it. And maybe you can argue this is just a cultural and regulatory issue, that better regulation would address this so that a spade is treated as a spade, that working 40 (or more) hours would be treated as proper full-time work.

But at the same time, there's a deeper reason corporations are doing this: Because they can. Unions are being smashed, labour's power is being broken. Why? Again, because corporations can. I feel these factors indicate that ultimately there really is an underlying labour surplus, tilting the scales in favour of employers, whether this is because of globalization (probably, at least so far) or automation.

These are concrete things with real material impacts. Their effects are not as clear and immediate as job reports so it's more difficult to source data and to articulate exactly what is happening, but that does not mean it's not real. I think there's a very real risk of ignoring the problem because the primary indicators can mask it to some degree, but there are major, concrete observable effects - greatly reduced labour bargaining power IS a data point.

I mean, yes, we're seeing very good employment numbers in the US at the moment. But it doesn't feel like a booming economy, now does it? What would those numbers look like if labour costs were more analogous to say, 1975 and employers were forced to call full time work full time work? Would companies swallow and pay more for full time employees? Would we see even more absurdly aggressive attempts to keep employees restricted to the less-than-33-hours-per-week threshold to keep them classified as part-time workers? Would we be seeing much more aggressive automation or outsourcing?

Yeah, there's an awful lot to unpack. Low unemployment is good, but there's a pretty big difference between quantity and quality. Temp jobs, part-time jobs, freelance jobs, low-wage jobs, etc. -- all that shit's a recipe for pretty serious stress, and seldom a good way to keep the bills paid. And corporations -- especially publicly-traded ones -- will do whatever they're legally allowed to do cut costs and maximize profits, plus whatever they're not legally allowed to do but think they can get away with. And all that's witout getting into income inequality, the wage gap, disproportionate unemployment for minorities, etc.

And it's inarguable that automation has wiped out entire industries, and fast. Know any travel agents?

And the ball's rolling on autonomous vehicles; they've got some growing pains to work out, but I think 20 years is a pretty safe estimate, and I don't think "revolutionary" is too strong a word for how much change they're going to bring. It's exciting, but I sure don't envy anybody who drives a cab or a bus or a truck for a living. I mean, for this and all the other reasons I already didn't envy those guys.

I've been pondering, for years, what the long-term consequences will be of a generation growing up with no concept of company loyalty or job security. I may have been thinking too small.

Some of you may have already seen the news about the massive Equifax data breach (if not, the short version is that "Equifax just let a data breach take their entire database, so the complete credit information for 150 million Americans is now out in the wild", this is a credit data breach of literally unprecedented scale). Well, check this out:

Mongrel wrote:Some of you may have already seen the news about the massive Equifax data breach (if not, the short version is that "Equifax just let a data breach take their entire database, so the complete credit information for 150 million Americans is now out in the wild", this is a credit data breach of literally unprecedented scale). Well, check this out:

Equifax said in a statement to CNNMoney that it found out about the security incident on July 29 and immediately took action.

But according to filings with the SEC, Equifax Chief Financial Officer John Gamble sold shares worth nearly $950,000 on August 1.

Joseph Loughran, Equifax's president for U.S. information solutions, sold shares worth about $685,000 on August 1 as well.

And Rodolfo Ploder, president of workforce solutions, sold stock for just more than $250,000 on August 2.

holy shit

May or may not be criminal, if it was pre-planned sales of stocks. My stocks vest once a quarter and I can opt into a program to auto-sell all the stocks I get in the next year (IE I could opt in for 2018 currently) which is safe from insider trading because I make the decision when I don't have material knowledge of business matters.

The hack checker page is probably only there to get people to agree to waive their right to sue by using it. Returning an accurate result is incidental at best - you want them to sign up for TrustedID.

のほも is such a good word?? the concept is kind of hard to fully get across in translation, but basically it means a feeling of pure, deep, platonic affection, and i think thats beautiful

TA wrote:The hack checker page is probably only there to get people to agree to waive their right to sue by using it. Returning an accurate result is incidental at best - you want them to sign up for TrustedID.

It's definitely back-pedalling, because for the first 2-3 days after the story broke they were being very aggressive (perhaps even... suspiciously aggressive?) in encouraging affected people to sign up for the service which included the waiver.

Seeing a lot of misogynistic commentary directed at the CSO, Susan Mauldin, mostly over a LinkedIn profile that showed she had degrees in music composition -- it also shows she'd held security positions at other companies, but everybody seems awfully interested in the "composition degrees" part, and it's hard to read those posts as anything but code for "girls can't computer".

It's unclear, at this point, just exactly what happened. We know they didn't patch a serious Struts vulnerability, and the Argentina region had a website with admin:admin as the username/password, but going straight from "someone made some very bad security decisions" to "music major" is awfully reductive.

It's entirely possible that this resulted from decisions that Mauldin made personally. And even if it didn't, the buck stops with the CSO; firing her was the right and necessary call.

Somebody -- almost certainly multiple somebodies -- fucked up here. It's entirely possible that Mauldin was an incompetent CSO who was either unaware of a serious vulnerability, or was aware of it and chose not to plug it in a timely fashion. It's also possible that she tried but was stymied by other executives (this isn't a simple matter of installing a patch; it would have meant installing a patch and then recompiling every Struts project on every website, which is exactly the kind of risky, time-consuming, and expensive process a short-sighted executive might put the kibosh on, and whatever else we know about Equifax at this point, we definitely know it is a company with short-sighted executives). Time will tell, and I'm sure there's plenty of blame to go around.

It may very well be that most of the blame rests with the CSO; it may very well be that she was dangerously unqualified. But I think too many people are drawing that conclusion too early, based on nothing more than a LinkedIn profile.